Pertinacity in phonology: Synchrony, diachrony, processing, modelling

A centuries-old assumption in linguistics is about to be turned on its head: phonological change—how the sounds of a language shift over time—may be far more constrained than anyone has believed. This matters because the standard view has been that sound change is common and pervasive, while syntax (sentence structure) changes only as a side effect. The project proposes a radical alternative: that phonology is "pertinacious"—stubbornly resistant to change. It distinguishes two types of pertinacity: one where surface forms change but underlying patterns persist, and another where surface forms look similar but the underlying grammar has shifted. To test this, the team will combine classical historical linguistics with psycholinguistic experiments, neurolinguistic brain imaging, and computational modelling, examining sound processes across three language families (West Germanic, North Germanic, and Indo-Aryan). This is fundamental science. If successful, it would reshape our understanding of how languages evolve and why they are both diverse and uniform. While there is no immediate practical application, deeper knowledge of the cognitive and neural constraints on sound systems could eventually inform speech recognition technology, language teaching, or the preservation of endangered languages—much as earlier fundamental work in phonology underpins today's voice-activated devices.